As a kid, I loved watching ESPN.
My day started with a morning edition of SportsCenter to catch up on any highlights of games I couldn’t watch the night before. After school, a rotation of shows like “Pardon the Interruption,” “Around the Horn” and “Highly Questionable” filled my afternoon before tuning into whatever game came on in the evening.
But as of today, I have cut down my viewing intake of ESPN and other sports networks such as FS1 and CBS Sports. Sports media on TV has evolved from hard-hitting reporting to people screaming at each other about whether or not LeBron James is balding.
The shift away from traditional reporting and a focus more on social media views has made the sports discourse more about who has the wildest take rather than what actually happened in the game.
“The shift in the central focus of sports journalism seems to go more and more toward, I would say, TV, but it's not even TV,” said sports media reporter Richard Deitsch in a Sep. 23 NPR article. “It's video streaming because there's so many platforms now. But kind of the focus being on the takes, the opinions, the back-and-forth, the podcast and cable shows as opposed to the writing.”
The shift in sports media really started during the mid-2000s. Former San Jose Mercury News beat reporter Skip Bayless left for ESPN in 2004 to start a new show called “Cold Pizza.”
The show was a first of its kind type of programming that featured Bayless arguing with various co-hosts on different topics surrounding the sports world. Bayless’s rowdy energy mixed with his shrewd reporting skills made the show entertaining for the normal sports fans.
As the show became more popular, Bayless said he knew he needed a more permanent co-host who could up the ante on the debate stage, according to a Sep. 7 episode of the “Skip Bayless Show.”
Bayless got his wish in 2012 when ESPN announced that sports columnist Stephen A. Smith would join a show called “First Take.” Smith and Bayless quickly rose to prominence, commanding one of the highest viewed shows in network television.
The two’s chemistry worked perfectly. Smith and Bayless were almost polar opposites when it came to their sports takes, creating the perfect forum for each of them to argue about almost any sports topic and make it entertaining.
But as the two grew bigger and bigger, the demand for networks to make shows with a similar format increased. Networks realized conflict created ratings and wanted to create shows where people constantly argued.
And that wasn’t just in the sports network space. According to a 2017 Vox Report, networks like CNN saw the viewership spike shows like “First Take” were getting and wanted to mimic that format.
When Bayless left the show in 2016 to host his new show “Undisputed” on FS1, a shift happened across sports TV. Now, everyone wanted to have morning and afternoon programming be mostly debate shows featuring crazy personalities that were columnists, former athletes or entertaining TV personalities.
Fast forward to today and TV programming has taken another step into sports news becoming more about entertainment and less about storytelling.
This past summer, ESPN laid off dozens of TV personalities who were respected for their intellect and shrewd reporting abilities. Max Kellerman, Neil Everett and Suzy Kolber were just a few of the ESPN staples that were laid off.
Who did the network bring in to replace them? How about a 40-something-year-old ex-punter whose show is based on being the “unfiltered” analyst in the room.
ESPN brought in former Indianapolis Colts punter Pat McAfee to bring more content to the network and paid $85 million dollars over a five year period to take over a lot of the network’s programming.
I’ll be the first to admit that McAfee’s show is entertaining as hell. Him and his crew of friends are funny and they often bring in great guests that bounce off of McAfee’s personality. But the problem is not so much with him as it is with ESPN and the sports landscape they are creating.
Today, ESPN’s programming is a mix of shows like “First Take” and “The Pat McAfee Show.” There are mid-day programs like “NBA Today” and “NFL Live,” but those shows — which used to be very news and reporting heavy — now revolve around sports personalities clashing with each other on sports topics.
Now, personalities like Smith and Bayless have seemingly abandoned their titles as journalists and have become full-time opinionists.
What made First Take very successful early on was that Bayless and Smith still used their journalistic skills to create their opinions. The two used to report games and write columns to formulate their opinions before coming onto the show to debate.
Now, they have seemingly retired from that type of work. What’s dangerous is that they have become so big that they are now playing characters instead of actually giving their opinions on things that matter in the sports world.
Pundits like Smith and Bayless have openly rooted for and against teams, something that has universally been taboo among those who work in sports media until now.
For example, Smith has become so anti-Dallas Cowboys that he has now made a career of making fun of the team when they lose. His patented catchphrase “what can go wrong, will go wrong,” is something that is said almost weekly on “First Take” during the NFL season.
There is no doubt that the way consumers view sports and the discourse around it is changing. No one really knows yet whether the new era of sensationalism among sports talk will actually last, but it’s dangerous.
When consumers get their news from pundits or opinionists, it usually doesn’t make viewers more informed regardless of what type of news they are watching. I fear that the reactionary nature of sports shows will make sports fans less informed while also giving them a warped reality of what sports actually are and its role in society.
